This is a slightly
frustrating disc for non-Swedish speakers
since there are no English notes and
for an English libretto one is directed
to a Stockholm phone number, something
I must say I’ve not pursued. Naturally
this serves mono linguists right; Swedes
can cope with most languages under the
sun. But it does rather limit appreciation
of Sagvik’s big choral work and indeed
limits awareness of the composer about
whom I know little except that he’s
composed in widely ranging forms (opera,
film music, string quartets) and who
began as a rock musician. He has a website,
which I’ve noted above.
His Mass is a near
eighty-minute work recorded problematically
in Maria Magdalena Church, Stockholm,
in 1996. There were spatial considerations
involved – a big gap separated singers
and conductors (something like forty
yards) – and the church acoustic and
recording set up makes for a degree
of constriction. Still the work is certainly
dramatic and, finally, cathartic. It
opens deceptively before a sudden eruption
of brass and percussion and voices;
instrumentally one hears the coiling
sound of saxophones as well. The Kyrie
is sonorously meditative, the next movement
strenuous with compelling and slowly
moving brass behind the soloist. One
can hear in Marta och Maria starkly
modernist devices married to parlando
and speech-singing elements. Where Sagvik
asks for tricky balances (brass and
percussion, bell tolls, solo voices
heard in different spaces) the recording
can be slightly askew but equally one
can be arrested by a sumptuous and radiant
sound, such as he produces in the Gloria
with its somewhat marchy-jazzy, almost
Waltonian presence.
The Mass takes in the
story of Lazarus, the longest movement
by some way, but reaches a peak of the
viscerally pictorial with the nails
being hammered through flesh in the
Credo – punishing rhythms and declaiming
choral interjections; baleful, brutal,
leaving little to the imagination. This
is reinforced in the Vid Golgata,
which is viciously pounding and then
flooded with plaintive reflection before
we reach the Sanctus. Here triumphalism
is interrupted by solo voices singing
with yielding pliancy and the work arcs
in a satisfactory way. This is never
an easy listen but the concentration
seldom sags. Curiosity may well be rewarded.
Jonathan Woolf
Maria Magdalena Motettkör/Ragnar Bohlin 
